Defending the cloud: 5 ways to shield your data

In an age where data is the new currency and businesses rely heavily on digital operations, the importance of cybersecurity cannot be overstated. As we move increasingly closer to primarily cloud-based operations, we need to rethink how we organize our defenses. Here are five tips on how to position yourself against becoming a target, and victim. 

Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, like ours, have revolutionized the way organizations conduct their daily operations, offering unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and convenience. Yet, as the cloud-based ecosystem continues to expand, so do the vulnerabilities and threats that jeopardize sensitive information and critical business operations. 

Cybersecurity in the realm of SaaS solutions is a multifaceted challenge that demands vigilance, adaptability, and an in-depth understanding of the evolving threat landscape. When organizations entrust their most valuable assets to the cloud, the need for robust, proactive, and innovative security measures becomes paramount. We know.  

 Here are the top five tips we’d like to share with you to safeguard your operations:

1. Annoying, but effective: Multi-Factor Authentication

What’s better than one form of identification? Two forms of identification! MFA drastically reduces risks associated with password theft and brute force attacks. Enforcing MFA for all critical systems is an easy but effective way to improve your cybersecurity. Most software systems let admins toggle on an “Enforce MFA” option, so just run through your key systems and turn it on! 

2. Some shall pass: Granulated access control 

Ensuring that only authorized users can access specific resources stops unauthorized access and prevents data breaches. It also makes it much harder for hackers to breach your system while simultaneously minimizing the impact of those potential breaches. An easy way to get started here is to segment your employees into two or three groups like “Managers,” “Regular Employees” and “Administrators”. Then, start restricting access to company resources like folders and documents based on those group roles. 

3. All things new: Keeping libraries updated

Third-party software is continuously updated with fixes for known security vulnerabilities, but these updates won’t help you if your organization doesn’t use them! Organizations should ensure that their software development culture is agile enough to keep up with the third-party libraries that they depend on. Otherwise, not only are you missing out on stability and performance improvements, but you are also risking security breaches.

Using Python as an example, you can start by running “pip list –-outdated" to get a list of outdated packages and “pip install –-upgrade package_name” for each package that you want to update. Do this manually as a first step, but make sure to build it into your Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines as soon as possible to continuously stay up to date. 

TRUST ALL, YET NO ONE: Cybersecurity is vitally important in an increasingly cloud based business world.

4. Stay up there: Store your data in the cloud 

Major cloud providers invest heavily in cybersecurity measures and have robust backup and redundancy mechanisms. They also have top-notch security teams and systems in place already to protect your data. These benefits are quite challenging and expensive to replicate locally, so it’s generally best to leverage cloud providers when you don’t have fantastic reasons (such as data sovereignty regulations or highly specific security needs) to do otherwise.  

5. A polished panic button: The response plan 

It’s important to run occasional “fire drills” for cybersecurity, not only to build awareness, but to let your people practice their responses and continuously improve. When everyone knows what to do, you can respond rapidly, minimize the impact of a breach and protect your company’s reputation. So plan, run a drill, gather feedback, improve the plan, and repeat the process several times every year. This approach will not only improve security, but will also reinforce trust between you, your partners, your clients, your employees and your users. 

Smartcube Solutions’ entire product range is SaaS and cloud based. Cybersecurity is paramount to both our users and the trustworthiness of our brand, and we spend a lot of time and resources to ensure that we stay on top of threats, both old and new.

If you are interested in knowing in detail what systems and methods we employ to keep our end users data safe and our solutions reliable, shoot us a line or comment below, and we’ll happily share some of our white papers with you.

Stay safe. 

#digitaltransformation #cybersecurity #SaaS #cloudcomputing